FLORIDA’S FORGOTTON COAST: LIFE ON THE APALACHICOLA BAY
WORKING THE BAY
Melaine Cooper Covell
James Hicks
Monette Hicks
Monica Lemieux
Carl McCaplan
James & Betty McNeill
Charles & Rex Pennycuff
A. L. Quick
Henry Tindell

TOOLS OF THE TRADE
Wes Birdsong
Corky Richards
Bobby Shiver
Charles Thompson
Genaro “Jiggs” Zingarelli

PROCESSING THE CATCH
Terry Dean
Grady Leavins
Lynn Martina
Fred Millender
Janice Richards
Anthony Taranto
Tommy Ward

THE SWEET SIDE
Donald Smiley
George Watkins

VINTAGE APALACH
Seafood & Honey

WHERE TO EAT
Apalach Eateries

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Interviews & photographs by Amy Evans

This project sponsored by the St. Joe Company.

The son of farmers, Donald Smiley was not born with the bay in his blood. He spent his childhood in the inland town of Wewahitchka. As a young man, Donald worked as an air conditioning technician in Panama City. But in 1980 he moved to Franklin County and began oystering. Donald says he made more money in one day of oystering than he could make in a week at doing A/C repair. He harvested oysters for the next thirteen years. But in 1993 the industry was changing so much that Donald wanted out. As a hobby, he started tinkering with bees. He read books and learned from other beekeepers. In time, Donald amassed enough hives to turn to beekeeping—and honey production—full-time. Today, Smiley Apiaries is a thriving business, specializing in tupelo honey. Donald has also gained some notoriety for his collaboration with Holley Bishop, author of the book Robbing the Bees. More than anything, though, Donald loves his bees. He has an appreciation for them, the process, and the especially the product. Donald eats some of his bees’ honey every day.

Listen to this 4-minute audio clip of Donald Smiley talking about the first time he ever handled honeybees.
[Windows Media Player required. Go here to download the player for free.]

What follows is a portion of the original interview that has been edited for length. To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.

Subject: Donald Smiley, beekeeper & former oysterman
Date: December 6, 2005
Location: Mr. Smiley’s home and honey house – Wewahitchka, FL
Interviewer: Amy Evans

Amy Evans:  This is Amy Evans on Tuesday, December 6th, 2005, and I'm in Wewahitchka, Florida, with Mr. Donald Smiley at his home and Smiley Apiaries. Mr. Smiley, would you say your name and your birth date, which is today, for the record, please sir?

Donald Smiley:  Yes. My name is Donald Smiley. My birthday was December 6, 1955.

And where were you born?

Born right here in Wewahitchka.

How far back does your family go in this area?

That's a good question. It goes quite a ways back sometime in the [nineteen] forties, I think.

And what business were your parents in in this area?

Well my father was—was already retired when I was born, and he was a carpenter. And he was also in the military when he was young and served in France in World War I.

What were your parents' names?

My father's name was—we called him CW, but his name was Cyrus Walter Smiley and my mother's name was Lula Mae. Her maiden name was Cook, and she was from Jackson County, Florida. She was raised on a farm. My father was from South Georgia and he was also raised on a farm.

What brought your father to Wewahitchka?

My mother. [Laughs] And they actually lived up near Blountstown; they owned a small farm up there and my mother wanted to move to Wewa—we call it Wewa—Wewahitchka and so they moved down here and bought a place in town, and that's where I was born.

——-

So what was it like growing up in Wewa?

Well, it was fun. It was a good place to grow up, and there was a lot of activities for a young boy to do. It was a lot of hunting and fishing and learning how to swim right down the road here in the river. It was one of those situations where you—you swim or drown. [Laughs] And so I had to learn how to swim real quick. [Laughs] But it was fun, you know. It was always something to do and never got bored. I never really left here. I moved to Franklin County when I started—started oystering in 19—1980 moved down there and lived down there for about thirteen years.

What made you want to get into oystering?

I wanted to make some money. At the time, I was working for an air-conditioning company. I had went to trade school and learned the air-conditioning trade. I worked for an air-conditioning company in Panama City, and I just couldn't live on the wages I was earning. I decided [that] I will work for myself, so I went into oystering—started looking at oystering. And I went down there and found me an old boat and got a motor, bought some oyster tongs and went down there. [I] worked one day and made more in one day than I made a whole week working in the air-conditioning business, and I didn't even know what I was doing then.

Did you buy all that equipment before you even got out on the water to oyster, or had you had some experience before then?

I bought the tongs. I had been out with some buddies of mine before, just messing around. But yeah, I bought all of the equipment. The outboard motor I already had. The tongs I had to buy. It seemed like they were about one hundred and twelve dollars.

Do you remember who you bought them from?

I remember where I bought them, but I don't remember the guy's name. He's probably dead now. He lived in Eastpoint. And the boat I got from a guy—it wasn't a real good oyster boat. It was too small. I got it from a guy on loan and made enough money the first week to pay for the boat, and it was three hundred dollars…So I used that boat for about three months, and then I bought a bigger boat.

What was your first day out on the bay like, do you remember?

Yeah. It seemed like it was in November, may have been in October. I'm not—I don't remember for sure but it was—it was a day about like today. It was cool, sunny and kind of warm. It wasn't real cold. That water was calm. And I went out of a place called the Eleven Mile. There was an oyster house there. A guy named Sammy Crumb owned the oyster house. And he sent me out to his lease—his oyster lease. And he said, “Just go out there where those boats are [and] you'll find a fellow out there named Cecil.” And [he] said, “You'll be in the right place.” That was my first day of oystering.

And using the tongs and was there a learning curve there for you?

Yeah, well I already knew how to use the tongs. It's pretty simple. But how to use them right, you know, that took—took some time.

Just the right way to use them?

Well I was digging too hard and getting too much mud on the oysters; they were kind of muddy. But eventually—eventually I learned how to get them up with them and then I had—I was digging down too hard…I ruined my eyes working on the water.

How's that?

From the sun—the reflection off the water and then the sun glaring in my eyes, it—it caused me to have a growth on one of my eyes called a pterygium. That's caused from working out in the sun.

And nobody wearing sunglasses or anything? They get in the way?

Yeah, I didn't wear sunglasses because when you're culling you get all that splatter on your glasses and—and you had to keep washing them off all the time. Didn't wear sun-shades, hardly anybody does.

——-

So what year did all the changes [in the seafood industry] squeeze you out of business?

Well [Sighs] 1993, December '93 orders were so bad. And I had moved back up here by then; I moved back up here in 1987. The orders were so bad, I'd drive fifty-some miles down there [to the bay] to go to work, and I never knew what my order would be for that day because they'd put you on a limit—limit of orders. It might be two bags, it might be four bags. I couldn't make a living on that. You know, two bags back then, I think we were getting nine [dollars and] fifty [cents] a bag then; the price had already dropped. And I can't even drive down there for that and pay my boat gas and truck—truck fuel. And I said well, I've had enough of this. By then I had already went through corrections training. And I said, I think I'll go ahead and put in an application somewhere. But before I even did that I got out of the oyster business, sold my boat—motor, tongs, everything—and got away from it. And in February [nineteen] ninety-four I went to work for the Department of Corrections. Three long years. That was probably the longest three years of my life. I hated that job.

What did you do for them?

I was a Security Guard in a prison [in] Liberty County, forty-three miles from my door to their door. It wasn't such a bad job. I mean, it had pretty good benefits. It didn't pay enough, but I knew what I was going to do. I had already had the bee business going, too. I started that in 1989. I knew I needed to find something else, so I got into beekeeping. And I was starting to do pretty good with it, but I knew that when I got my bees built up, I needed at least 300—400 hives of bees to begin to make a living with it. When I got that many I turned my resignation in at the prison and left and never looked back. I concentrated solely on the beekeeping business, and I've done well.

When you were growing up were there a lot of beekeepers here in Wewa[hitchka] or the area?

When I was growing up, yeah, there was. It was quite a few—a lot more than there is now. Yeah, but, you know, got old and sold out and retired and—and I think the Laniers is the only family that's still in it that was in it many, many years ago. I mean they're already in their third generation of beekeeping.

How did you learn?

Reading and talking to other beekeepers. I read a lot of books—a lot of books. And I talked to a lot of beekeepers. I had a beekeeper friend that was an oysterman. He's actually the one that really got me interested in bees. He was doing it part-time. I talked to a lot of beekeepers. I worked with an old beekeeper at Howards Creek. That's where I got most of my experience from—is from him and his knowledge [Mr. Broward Mixon, deceased]. He was—he was probably the best one overall that I learned from. The rest, you know, you learn by doing it. And I've been successful at it. It’s been good to me.

Were there mistakes at the beginning?

Oh, yeah. There was mistakes at the beginning, in the middle and—and right now. I still make mistakes. You never  learn everything. I learn something new every year. Every year is different. The beekeeping is the most satisfying work I've ever done in my life.

How so?

Well it's a challenge and it's fascinating. A honey bee is a fascinating insect. I didn't realize it at the beginning, but honey bees—like right now their value as pollinators nationwide is about fifteen billion dollars a year just in their pollination benefit. About one-third of every mouthful of food we consume is directly related to the honey bee. That was just amazing to me to find that out. And I learned that by reading and that just fascinated me. And the way they produce honey, and we're able to sit bees out—they're insects and they make more honey than they need, so we can take it away from them and use it and make—turn it into money.

How many hives did you start out with?

Eight.

And where did you get your bees?

I bought them from a guy in Ponte Verde Beach over near Jacksonville. When I bought them I didn't know how to handle bees or anything, and it was kind of scary. You know, the guy I bought them from, we went over there to load them up in my truck, you know, and the bees started running out and [makes buzzing sound] and it was dark. Ugh, it was kind of scary. I got them home and had to unload them by myself, and they were heavy. I didn't even have a veil to wear, so I made one out of a piece of screen and tied it around my head. [Laughs] It was something, I'll tell you.

Did you have a place to put them when you brought them back?

I set them in the backyard.

May I ask you what kind of investment that is to get—?

[One] thousand dollars. I bought eight hives of bees and enough equipment for fifty hives…That was a thousand dollars, and then the next year I had forty-five [hives] because I figured out how to make increases. I probably didn't do it right, but it worked, and it just grew from there. I'd buy more equipment, and I paid as I went. I didn't go in debt. And I just built them all up and learned—kept learning. And I'm still learning…And I built up—I had built up—last year I was up to about twelve hundred hives and one full-time worker. I had some part-timers, too, and I decided one day I'm just tired of just work, work, work all the time. I said I am tired of working like this. I don't get to do anything but work anymore. So I decided I'd sell off five hundred hives, so I did. I just figured it where I'd sell five hundred hives. And now I'm down to about five hundred now.

How many years was it that you were overlapping the beekeeping with the oystering and corrections [work]?

In [nineteen] eighty-seven—let me see. [Nineteen] eighty-nine, I started beekeeping—keeping bees and from [nineteen] ninety-three—so that's three years. I was still oystering while I had bees, and then three more years at the prison, I still had bees. So it took me six years to build a beekeeping business up to where I could make a living on it. And when I went into it full-time, I could really get something done, you know.

So what's your annual schedule of beekeeping because I know that tupelo [honey] has a really short season?

Okay, I'll start from the beginning of my season, which is with the first maple bloom at the end of December or the first week of January. That's when my beekeeping cycle begins because that's when my spring starts. That's when the bees start getting the first new pollen of the year. And then when they start getting that new pollen, the Queen begins to lay eggs and there's an increase in the hives' population. [It] has new bees hatching out every day. And they build up; they just build on up. And then the Titi bloom begins and that's a big nectar source for them. And there's a lot of other things blooming, too but Titi is the main thing. And they really increase their population even more faster and build up and on into March and then—and we got what we call swarm season. That's when the bees have reached their peak population and then they get an urge to swarm, and that's how they re-propagate their species is by swarming, leaving the hive. Part of the bees leaves the hive—not all of them. And the Queen usually goes with the first swarm, and they go find some other house—place to live somewhere. It's called swarm season. What we try to do is to prevent that swarm or use the swarm to make a new beehive—trick the bees and make them think they've swarmed. They don't need to swarm anymore. There's a trick to it, and you can increase the number of beehives you have by doing that and still have honey production out of those hives, if you do it right. You got to have the swarms. A hive will swarm two or three times, you know. You'll have—your first swarm is usually the biggest, and then you'll have a second swarm a little smaller and then a third and a fourth, and they get smaller and smaller. It weakens your colony down. Well, it's not going to produce anything—it may not die, because they'll hatch off a new Queen. But they won't produce anything. So we try to control that. And what we try to do is keep our bees at peak—you know peak level, strong beehives, going into the tupelo flow because that's our main crop, and that's the one we make the money on. If we can keep them in—in top form as the tupelo begins to bloom, then they'll make a lot of tupelo honey, if the flow is good. And that—usually it starts in April fifteenth—anywhere from the fifteenth to the twenty-fourth or later. I've seen it come in later. This year it came in May before it came in. But that's unusual. The flow will last—I've seen it last one day and didn't make anything. I've seen it last four weeks. I've seen it last a week, nine days, two weeks—depending on the weather. If we've got good perfect weather, if all the conditions are perfect—the trees have plenty of water, the river is high, warm sunny days, cool foggy nights, no rain, no heavy rain, no hard wind—you might get the tupelo crop…I've seen a rainstorm come through at night or even in the day—usually they're at night—see the tupelo blooms when it’s—when it’s opened and the bees are working it. It’s very heavy with nectar. And it doesn’t take a whole lot to knock that bloom out of the tree. A heavy rainstorm or real hard wind can knock all the flowers out of the trees and end the—end the flow. But it’s—it’s a real heavy nectar flow and the bees will go at it so hard and so fast that anything else that’s blown—never how minor it is—they just pass it up and go for that tupelo because it’s a rich source of nectar and pollen for the bees.

How do you know when you definitely do have a good crop of honey?

What we've got when the bees are through making it. That's how you know—when we're putting it in the box. When you go out there and open the beehive up and pull a honeycomb out—a frame of honey—and you turn it upside down and the nectar is dripping out of it, you know there's one good honey flow.

So how do you watch that? How do you baby-sit it and know when it's ready to harvest?

When they stop working the tupelo [blooms]. You can look at the tupelo trees and tell when the flowers are drying up. And when the honey is ripest is when it's sealed with a wax cap. When the bees cap it off, it's ripe and it's ready to harvest…You know these things by being out there every day, going in the bees, looking at the bees, looking at the trees. See, when the tupelo begins to bloom, we have to strip all the bees down, strip all the boxes of honey they have on them off—extract and put clean empty boxes of comb back on so they fill it up with tupelo.

What do you do with that other honey?

We extract it and sell it at bakeries. You get bakery-grade honey.

Do you do anything with the extra wax that comes off the combs?

Uh-hmm. Render it, pour it in a forty-pound wax pan molds. I've got a bunch of it out there. I'll show it to you.

Okay. So where are you putting your bees?

Well, I just started moving them back—back from the farms up north of me. That's where I bring them every summer after the tupelo flow is over and move them out and bring them up there. It's better. There's more for them to feed on up there, plus we get another honey crop. Right now, some of them are still up there, and some of them I've got here in the backyard. I set a bunch of them back here because I got to do some mite treatments on them. And then I'll move them out to my tupelo location.

Do you have a relationship with farmers in the area for pollinating their crops and whatnot?

Uh-umm. Not here but in Jackson County and South Georgia—Southwest Georgia and around here. The tupelo locations, I either own them or lease them from the people that own the property.

So in high tupelo season, how many groups of hives do you have out?

Got nine, nine locations.

And just you and one other guy work when tupelo is coming in?

Right now there's just me and one part-time guy now. No, when we're harvesting the honey, I have more than just one person helping me. I have to.
Those boxes of honey are heavy. Some of them weigh one hundred and ten pounds.

So tell me, when you're harvesting and it's, you know, really coming in, what a typical day is like.

[Laughs] A typical day, we'll leave here about seven o'clock in the morning, and we'll go out there and get the truck ready. We'll get all our hand-truck pallets on the truck, and these are what we're going to stack the boxes of honey on—hand-truck pallets. And I have some six-way pallets that I stack six stacks of honey on. I use a forklift to move them around. I didn't use to have that forklift. We'll get all of our Bee Go on the truck and make sure we've got Bee Go, plenty of water to drink, some ice, and our hand-truck pallets, acid boards, bee blower—

What is Bee Go?

It's butyric acid. It's what we put on what's called a fume board, and we set that on top of the beehive, and it runs the bees out. It's called Bee Go. Smells really bad. I'll let you smell some of it. Did you ever smell rancid butter? You don't want to squirt it up your nose. Yuck. Or get it on your clothes. And then we leave to go to the bee yard. Usually everybody knows what to do, and they get out and start doing their thing. I usually light the smoker and get the acid boards ready and the fume boards ready. And as I'm getting them ready, they're over there putting them on the bees. And then we get the truck ready and start setting honey on them. And we go through that yard and strip it down, bring the honey in and put it in the honey house. And then I have a crew that starts extracting the honey, and we may go out and get another yard and bring it in. Then at the end of the day, if we need to hurry up and get the combs back on the bees, we take them out and put them back on the bees. Even if it's after dark, which has happened many times. And it's just a matter of going out there and picking the lid up and setting the box on top of the beehive and putting the lid back on. And then the next day we go do it all again, and once we get all of our bakery honey extracted and all the combs are empty, we go back to all the bee yards and start putting all those supers back on the bees. We just stack them all on there and fill them up with tupelo. And, of course, we have to drum—put the honey in drums at the end of the day. And now when tupelo is over usually we might pull honey for two days and then extract for a day, and then pull honey the next day and next day and part of the next morning and then in the evening, go get honey. We just—we're getting honey and bringing honey in every day until we get it all off.

So how many days does it take to harvest nine bee yards of tupelo?

About a week. We can get it all off in a week or less. Spend another week and a half extracting.

Then you have enough to sell the rest of the year?

[Nods “yes”] The best year I ever had was I made one hundred drums with—with six hundred and thirty hives. The year before last we had a little over a thousand, and I think we made fifty-something, so it was a short flow. This year I had about five hundred and fifty pounds and produced fifty-two barrels.

You sell everything from the little honey bear to like a gallon?

A fifty-five-gallon drum.

You sell a fifty-five-gallon drum? And you were telling me outside that you supply the honey to that restaurant in Ashville?

Yeah, I supply honey to Tupelo Cafe in Ashville [North Carolina], and I've been their supplier since the day they opened in 1999, I think.

How did they find you?

The internet. [My] website.

When did you get the website going?

1999, I think.

How has that changed your business?

Well, to start with it didn't change it that much. The first website wasn't that good, so I had a new one done. And that—I started getting more orders almost immediately. But it's changed—it's changed a lot. I'm able to package more honey into smaller containers and sell directly to the consumer. It's made my life a little more busier because it takes a lot of time to package honey, and everybody wants raw, unheated, unfiltered honey. And to get that kind of honey the way I do it is I have to strain all the honey. And if you don't heat honey it takes a long time to strain it because it has little tiny particles of wax on it, and people don't want to see that floating around in their honey. So I strain it. Now if I was to heat it, I could strain it real fast and bottle it real fast. But the way it is, I have to strain while it's at ambient temperature and bottle it at whatever the ambient temperature is.

So how does the heat change the honey?

If you heat honey, if you get it over say ninety-eight degrees, it's going to change the nature of the honey. First, it's going to destroy the enzymes and minerals in the honey and second it's going to change the color and the flavor of the honey, and I don't want that. People want raw unfiltered honey—as natural as you can get it. The purest most natural honey you can get is honey that's still in the comb—in the honeycomb. I have some of that, too.

Do you sell a lot of that?

Oh, quite a bit, quite a bit. It's high-dollar stuff.

Are there a lot of locals who buy from you or is it mostly—?

There are a lot of locals and I sell to people all over the country everywhere.

What's the furthest place you've shipped your honey?

Germany.

Do you have a lot of folks coming by from out of town to your place here?

Yep. Uh-hmm, getting more and more every year. Oh yeah, when this book came out, this—me and this lady, Holly Bishop—

Uh-huh, [who wrote] Robbing the Bees?

Yeah, we worked on this book for three years, and it just came on the market in May of last year.

I haven't seen the paperback. I remember when the hardback came out.

Yeah, this is the advanced readers' copy here. Orders started shooting up, you know. That was a good thing.

So tell me about your relationship with your bees.

My relationship with my bees. I love my bees. Before I married my wife that I have now I told her, I said, “I'm married to my bees first, and then I'm married to you.” The bees are number one. I take care of them, and they take care of me. I love them. I love what I do. I like my work. It's getting harder because I'm getting older. But I still love it.

——-

Have you ever had anybody express an interest in apprenticing with you to learn the trade?

Yeah, I've apprenticed a couple of people, yeah. There's a young boy right here in town that he started—well, he showed an interest in bees quite a few years back. He was about fourteen, and I worked with him quite a bit. As a matter of fact, he's the one that bought half of the—half of my bees last year. He's real good with bees. As far as whether he's going to make it in the beekeeping business or not, I don't know.

What do you think it takes to keep a good honey business?

A willingness to work, discipline—be very disciplined, a certain amount of toughness and you've got to love it. If you don't love it, it's not the job for you. Because beekeeping can get painful at times—getting stings and I get bee stings today—it hurts the same as it did the first day I started the bee business. It still hurts. It just don't swell up. I won't swell, I have an allergic reaction to it.

Tell me how that transformation happened when you started and you didn't know how to handle bees when you picked them up, and now you have such an appreciation for them.

Well the way you learn how to handle them—the way I learned how to handle them was when I started helping a man at Howard's Creek named Broward Mixon. An old man, he needed some help, and I needed to learn, so I got with him and we just went out there and got in the bees. And I remember the first day down there he opened up a beehive and I opened it up. He was standing there holding the smoker. I had a veil on, and I didn't even know how to tie my veil properly. I just had it hanging on my head. And we opened it up and looked in there and he said, “Pull a frame out and see if the queen is laying.” So I did, and she's laying. I looked down at the bottom board and I said. “You want me to clean that bottom board off?” He said, “Yeah.” I took more frames out, and I started bumping that propolis [bee glue, a resinous substance bees use to construct and maintain their hives] off the bottom board, and the bees just got me on the back of my hand and they got underneath of my veil and stinging him and kind of a cool east wind blowing, and those bees were mean. Of course, if he had smoked them a little bit it might have helped. He just wanted to see what I was made of. And he said, “I think it's a little too cool to mess with these bees today. They're biting us too hard.” I said. “Yeah, I think you're right.” [Laughs] But my hand swelled up about twice its normal size and—but anyway, when I went back I knew I better tie my veil this time and I learned how to handle them by handling them—just by getting in them and—and just doing it—learning how to handle them. The first year was the hardest. I remember the first—my own bees now—the first time I moved bees at night during a honey flow that trip from Jacksonville was nothing. That was easy. I had bees sitting out here on the Titi yard. The tupelo was starting to bloom. So I went out here and took the honey off the bees, and I brought it in, and I went back that night to move the bees. And they were on the trailer. So I hooked my truck to the trailer and drove off, tied the bees down and drove off, and these bees were strong bees—strong beehives. And I got to where I was going with them and it was pitch-black dark. And so I brought a spotlight with me. And I had my wife hold the spotlight, you know, so I could see. She shined that light on that trailer and you could see—all you could see was bees. My God, there were bees everywhere. That trailer was real rough and it was a rough road I went down. It was real bumpy and they were mad. And I was smoking them—way over-smoking them. The smoke just made them run everywhere. The thing about bees, they won't fly in the dark. They can see in the dark, but they won't fly in the dark, but they'll crawl everywhere. And I had bees crawling all over me—up my britches leg, up my shirtsleeve. You could feel them. I had some slits in my veil, you could feel them in there on top of my head. I don't know how I got those bees off of that trailer that night, but I did, and I tell you what. That night, if someone would have said, “You want me to help you with those bees?” I'd have said, “You can have them if you can get them off the trailer!” I'd have gave them away that night.

——-

What do you think the future of tupelo honey is?

The future of tupelo honey looks pretty good. For me and my area, the way development is moving in, I'm probably going to lose some of my tupelo locations because of high property value and more and more people moving to the area. And that's what I think is going to happen, as far as my business is concerned.

Do you have a favorite thing about keeping bees?

Yeah. Other than being independent, my favorite thing—at least it used to be—was watching the beehives grow. And in the springtime watch the brood nest expand and the population increase. The bees were working really hard. The Queens—beautiful Queens—laying lots of eggs every day. Those are my favorite things.

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